When the listing agent is a wildcat, things might blow up

Q: We were going to make an offer on the perfect home for us. We have been referred to a Silicon Valley buyer’s agent known for getting sales accepted. It was a real stunner to receive the phone call that we are not to waste our time making an offer. Our talented buyer’s agent told us she spoke with the listing agent who was “writing offers for multiple buyers” on his seller’s property. Our agent politely told us “forget it; you’re not going to get this house, the listing agent is an idiot.” She quickly ended the call and left us stunned. Should we knock on the seller’s door and explain what happened?

A: No. The seller’s agent in question is drilling for oil at his employer’s expense, and on his client’s property no less. Agents promoting dual-agency (legally representing both a buyer and seller in one sale) may need an an ethics lesson for extracting every feet-of-pay out of a client’s property. These types of licensees are not roughnecks surveying a field of over 10,000 agents fit to present a homebuyer. Any listing agent’s rework operation of representing two homebuyers is a structure trap to engineer their reservoir of profitability by cementing fear and greed. They don’t want to “lose a buyer” to the density of skilled agents in every Bay Area geographical area.

As a columnist, I cannot use the industry term idiot. Instead, I’ll defer to the listing agent in question, and others like him as the semi-skilled roustabout. The legal ramifications of representing two sets of buyers and one seller are akin to insisting that it’s preferable for all three to smoke while working on an oil rig. Things might blow up; then, again, they might not. In these cases, the sellers think they have the mineral right, and the brokerage has the surface rights. These homeowners have no idea their roustabout entered them into a blind pool where daily drilling reports slant toward their “trusted” employee’s wealth, not theirs. Homebuyers against home sellers, in this blowout, file over 90 percent of California claims, and all three principals might sue the cigar-smoking listing agent. And that exposes him as a financial wildcat, not a groundbreaker.